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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Unsurprisingly, the Coxon dipshit who is getting all the press for quitting his cushy AI-industry job is a MIRI fanboy:

    I’ve been associating with rationalists for almost a decade. Their ideas were compelling and you can’t deny their foresight. The founders of every superintelligence effort are all bound up in the rationality sphere. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman used to frequent the MIRI offices.

    If MIRI was Sam Altman’s old stomping ground, and the AI industry is so evil he can’t work in it, isn’t this an argument that MIRI was either a failure or bad all along?

    The way I relate to rationalists is it’s like the bizarre hypertrophied physiques on specialized athletes. In my opinion they have weirdly specialized minds that make them uniquely correct about topics removed from daily experience. These “specialized minds” can also make them off-putting to many people.

    I don’t know if I’d consider myself a rationalist. I am intuitively opposed to polyamory, veganism, and consequentialist intuitions. But I certainly trust them to be correct about factual questions.

    “I’m intuitively opposed to culinary traditions that people have been developing for hundreds of years, but gosh dang it, when they talk about the Machine God torturing a billion simulated copies of me unless I tithe my income to a Harry Potter fanfiction writer, I’m sold!”

    Every time this dorkus is in the news, remember, he’s an absolute wanker.






  • It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.

    Edit to add: I think there’s a concentrated lump of illustrative lesswrong in this passage:

    Also especially popular these days is a ZKP of your own tastes: as almost everyone has developed kinks that put a relatively normal goblin kink to shame, people have become more anxious about unaccepting people finding out. So now you can confirm that you and your girlfriend have a CPU-cuck fetish in common without her ever finding out that you and your grandma both enjoy spankings—amazing!

    Yes, “ZKP” is dropped in without elaboration or definition. But more fundamentally… why, though? This reads like someone has thought too long and yet also too superficially about kink. Why has “almost everyone” developed these bizarre new tastes? What taboos are they transgressing, what vulnerabilities are they exposing, what strictures of life are they seeking to escape? What’s the itch?! And yet look at the fetishes that are specifically named: “spankings” (literally, not figuratively older than Aristotle) and a thinly science-fictionalized kind of swinging. This isn’t a new frontier in depravity; it’s a bachelorette party for normies. The whole thing feels like a product of a mind that’s strongly confined to a narrow understanding. It unhesitatingly accepts the importance of “freaky” sex and goes out of its way to bring that into the story, but it has nothing to say about the subject it has locked upon.